The company has recorded an AU$14.4 million profit and 51 percent year-on-year increase in revenue to AU$45 million for the 2004 financial year.
According to ninemsn chief executive officer, Martin Hoffman, the search portal's effort to reach profitability was a battle to achieve scale.
"You can see that from the economics of the way these businesses work that once you get above a certain scale they start generating very strong returns," said Hoffman.
According to Hoffman the shift to profitability was primarily being driven by strengthening demand for advertising on its portal.
He said the portal was now beginning to attract big brand name brand advertisers coming online now for the first time.
However, ninemsn still appears to be lagging behind when it comes to monetising search.
"Search is still growing strongly but that sort of market has really only started for us in the past year," said Hoffman.
Hotmail, messenger and conventional Web banners continue to be the portal's main source of advertising revenue while it relies on Yahoo Australia for its algorithmic and paid search services.
Hoffman said the company's plans to introduce its own search technology before the end of the year were still on track but it's still playing its card close to its chest when it comes to releasing details about the product.
The company claims its "seen no dip in active [Hotmail] accounts" numbers since rival Web mail providers, Yahoo and Google began offering generous e-mail storage quotas.
As a System Administrator, I deal with Microsoft systems all day.
I personally believe the NineMSN search hit rate is misleading to potential advertisers. This is mainly due to the large IE6 community. By default, if you open an IE web browser and type an incorrect URL, IE redirects the URL input to the search.msn.com engine. Promptly the user will correct the URL and carry on. I believe NineMSN still claims the hit though. Thankfully this behaviour can be changed via the registry to a more useful search engine, like Google.
Knowing how much spam is spoofed using the hotmail.com domain, my organisation and many others block and drop this domain.
Hotmail users need to know that their important email may not reach the recipient and they will not be notified.
Personally I use Telstra's revamped WebMail facility, but there are so many other alternatives to Hotmail.
Why is there so many Hotmail users? Windows Messenger...A handy chat program, which has very annoying integration into other MS applications
Microsoft are the "package deal convenience kings". Install the OS, get a free uninstalled Browser (I don't mind IE though) and Messenger client.
Want to use the Messenger client, well get yourself a hotmail or msn email account first.
Get a hotmail account and get free spam plus unreliable delivery.
NineMSN profits are generated by forcing users into a Hotmail account plus the incorrect URL search engine to gain a larger client and hit base and make their statistics look more convincing to a prospective advertiser.
Lawton